What if they shot you in the face

Fair warning: the details below are fairly graphic and could be upsetting to some readers. Proceed with caution. By now, you probably know that a bullet can punch its way into the human body pretty well. Stop counting sheep today. Fall asleep to the sounds of nature or comforting ambient noise.

For starters, when a bullet enters your body, your flesh absorbs a great deal of the momentum the bullet was carrying. A 9mm bullet, which is typically fired from handguns used for self-defense and by police, travels at a speed of about mph. All that momentum has to go somewhere, so the bullet transfers it to your body , causing it to expand and create a large cavity, then falling back in on itself.

After the bullet tears into your flesh, fate rolls the dice. Blood loss, which Narciso asserts is the number one preventable cause of death on the battlefield he says that about 90 percent of those preventable deaths are due to blood loss. They cut through arteries and veins without alerting your muscles to the danger.

The other danger, of course, is organ damage that leads to organ failure. If a bullet strikes a vital organ, it will tear through it the same way it did with your outer flesh. What about bulletproof materials like kevlar , you ask? Think of the bullet as a soccer ball, and the kevlar—as well as your flesh behind it—being the net.

I had been waiting to see my life flash before my eyes, to see the white light, and none of it happened. I heard sirens. I was taken to Fairfax Inova Hospital and was in a semi-coma for three weeks.

I was vaguely aware of my visitors. So many friends came by that I was told later they lifted the restriction of only two visitors at a time. My mother, brother, father, and stepmother were there. I remember being annoyed with my mom because she kept making me wiggle my fingers and toes to prove I could hear, and I just wanted to sleep.

When I woke up from my coma, my dad was holding my hand. He told me all that I had to do was heal. I had a tracheotomy and a feeding tube in my stomach. And I had to chop off all my hair because it was full of blood and bone. But I was so happy to be alive. I ended up moving into an extended stay hotel, where I took care of myself for two years. I got on disability and Medicaid and my family pitched in.

I also started to see a psychiatrist and a therapist. The wonderful man that I was dating at the time is partially deaf so I had to speak with emphasis and clarity in order for him to understand me. It was a form of speech therapy. I was eligible for formal speech therapy, but I felt I was doing pretty well on my own and because rest was such a vital part of my recovery, I tried to limit my activities. It was about a year before I could speak clearly enough for most people to understand me.

In November , three years after I tried to commit suicide, I could finally talk again, and I started volunteering at the hospital that saved my life. I am still missing a third of my tongue, and I have 11 teeth. You can tell that something happened to me, but I look mostly like I did before.

And that is due to the skill and perseverance of my amazing plastic surgeon, Dr. Reza Mirali. Because I knew how much he believed in me, I never got to that point where I wanted to give up.

So I sleep 16 hours a day. And yes, this whole process has been very painful. For about a year, any time I saw a gun in front of me, I felt compelled to pick it up and shoot myself. I am around guns because I have several friends who are ex-military and they own guns, and I also have a lot of friends who are pro-gun, so when I visit their houses, I know there are guns in the house. My dad asked the detective who worked on my case to have my gun destroyed so it would never hurt another person.

I will never own another gun again. I worry about re-entering the job market and trying to explain this six-year blank in my resume. Perhaps by acknowledging how severe depression and anxiety can be, we can provide help for other people. Turns out plenty. And if there was some swelling, well, perhaps I'd tease the local raccoons with a raw sirloin comically draped across my mouth.

Because I'm a jerk to woodland creatures that way. A quick check in the bathroom mirror disabused me of the notion that I was going to be Happy Gilmore. It looked like Predator had stopped over at my place to take a whiz.

My lower jaw was hanging in two different directions and most of my lower teeth looked like they were gone. This was not a waggle-daggle your head and get back to regular business scenario. This was stuff. I no longer had a phone, so the nice lady next door won the blood-spitting-smashed-face-neighbor surprise doorbell lottery.

After 18 hours in the ER, I got good news -- all my teeth were intact well, for now -- more about that later -- and bad news -- my lower jaw and left cheek were "interestingly" fractured.

My mouth was going to be wired shut. Anita Serwacki "The things we did last summer, I'll remember all winter long As it turns out, I was pretty fortunate I didn't get killed. All the ridiculous "knock-out game" hysteria aside, one solid punch can easily be fatal. While not common, a mandibular fracture fancy talk for broken jaw that makes you sound like a violated insect can lead to a lacerated facial artery. But normally when people do die after getting socked in the jaw, it's because they're standing up, then take a spill and crack their skull open on something.

Same goes for being walloped in the nose despite the myths, you're not in danger of having bone shards lodged in your brain from a nose punch. So, for once, sitting on my ass did me a solid.

Anita Serwacki. There are no real hi-tech alternatives to having your jaw wired shut. It's a multi-hour process that involves what looks like an American Horror Story tool kit and coils of industrial metal that are wound through your teeth and twisted off at the ends like barbed wire. Primary Surgery "At this point, the patient may begin screaming in agony. This is normal. Now What?

In fact, they don't really give you any information at all on how to go on being a living human being. Luckily at least for me, not for them I have a few friends who have had their jaws wired up for significant spells, so I was given some advice. Your mouth will taste like corpse, because all the blood that gushed about after you got punched in the face is still tucked into the crevices, just stinking it up in there under a thick layer of plaque build-up.

And in the midst of that cauldron of gross, you're crammed full of barbed wire that is constantly slicing open the insides of your cheeks. You can't really brush your teeth, so the best chance you have at not developing scores of new cavities and nasty infections which could even lead to having parts of your jaw removed! What if you start to choke or puke? Good question! You will need to get those wires off in a hurry, so you will not die in a manner your family will be reluctant to print in an obituary.

A small, sharp pair of jewelry wire-cutting scissors should remain on you at all times like a talisman. And while not technically dangerous, there's one last thing you don't expect.